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31/12/2016

As with previous
years, ‘The Playlist’ is a musical summary of the year’s theatre-going. The
rule is (mostly) simple: find a piece of music that encapsulates either the
production or my response to it, or both as the case often is. The only catch
is I cannot re-use a piece from a previous year, even if it is the same text
(return seasons of a production are excused).

16/12/2016

First produced in 2003 by
Melbourne’s Playbox theatre company (now Malthouse), Tom
Wright’s Babes in the
Wood was a twenty-first century take on the colonial pantomime
tradition, spiralling out of control into a hallucinogenic cornucopia of
disreputability. Now, thirteen years later, Don’t
Look Away – the company responsible for Inner
Voices and The
Legend of King O’Malley – have returned to the woods of the Old Fitz, and have brought us
something approximating a sequel but also a more contemporary reinterpretation
of the panto tradition and an interrogation of the milieu from which the
Australian pantomime tradition sprang in the nineteenth century, as well as our
own 2016 context. And even though it might look like it’s raided a Christmas
warehouse for its set in the best possible way imaginable, it still packs a
satirical punch and leaves you doubled over in laughter, appropriately heckling
the performers and throwing cabbage. What’s not to love?

09/12/2016

At the Adelaide
Festival in 2014, a new play by Matthew
Whittetwas premiered. Forming
the third part in a trilogy for Windmill
Theatre Co. (what is now known as the The
Windmill Trilogy), the play was the story of fourteen year old Greta
Driscoll, her dreaded fifteenth birthday party, and everything that happened on
that night. The play was Girl Asleep, and it
went on to become an internationally successful
film. When it premiered in Adelaide,
playing in rep with the rest of the trilogy, I missed it due to Hilary
Bell’s gorgeous version of The Seagull,
and the first instalment of the trilogy, Fugitive. But
two-and-a-half years and numerous successful film festival campaigns later, Girl Asleep rocks onto Belvoir’s corner stage in all its 1970s
glory, but I can’t help but wonder if it suffers from Whittet’s tendency to
wallow in a conceit without properly exploring and/or developing its structure
and the full extent of the world.